Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Broken Blossoms
By V.S. Pritchett
The Tale of Genji
by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker
Knopf, 1,090 pp., $25.00
When Arthur Waley's translation of The Tale of Genji came out, volume by volume, in the late Twenties and early Thirties, the austere Sinologue and poet said that Lady Murasaki's work was 'unsurpassed by any long novel in the world.' If we murmured, 'What about Don Quixote or War and Peace?' we were, all the same, enchanted by the classic of Heian Japan which was written in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and we talked about its 'modern voice.' What we really meant was that the writing was astonishingly without affectation. Critics spoke of a Japanese Proust or Jane Austen, even of a less coarse Boccaccio. They pointed also to the seeming collusion of the doctrines of reincarnation or the superstition of demonic possession with the Freudian unconscious—and so on.
Review, 3520 words
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